Digitally Embellishing Photographs

Oh I just love my Paint Shop Pro tool! I have the newest version and what fun it is to embellish photographs! Below I simply used a rectangle tool to frame my daughter’s face and then I added her name and the year the picture was taken… and then added a few swirls using a Paint Shot Pro brush I picked up along the way… If you haven’t tried to embellish your photos… you really should… it will make your scrapbook pages unique… I am planning on using the cheep talk stamp set to layout my page for this picture… I was thinking old olive and pixie pink birds! to match the colors in this hat…

There’s a really silly story behind this photo… she wears this hat everywhere… it is the most brightest (hot pink) silliest hat… but oh how it frames her face perfectly! And it makes her green eyes pop! I want to put in a journal entry with this…

So the question is which graphics file format do you use to save the Digitally Embellished Photograph? Well… the answer is it depends…. If you are going to print the photograph – then use PNG format… if you are going to only edit once and then view the photograph – use JPEG…. Here’s why….

JPEG Format

JPEG (pronounced JAY-peg) is a commonly used method of compression for photographic images. The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image quality. JPEG typically achieves 10:1 compression with little perceptible loss in image quality.

JPEG compression is used in a number of image file formats. JPEG/Exif is the most common image format used by digital cameras and other photographic image capture devices; along with JPEG/JFIF, it is the most common format for storing and transmitting photographic images on the World Wide Web. These format variations are often not distinguished, and are simply called JPEG.

The JPEG compression algorithm is at its best on photographs and paintings of realistic scenes with smooth variations of tone and color. For web usage, where the bandwidth used by an image is important, JPEG is very popular. JPEG/Exif is also the most common format saved by digital cameras.

On the other hand, JPEG is not as well suited for line drawings and other textual or iconic graphics, where the sharp contrasts between adjacent pixels cause noticeable artifacts. Such images are better saved in a lossless graphics format such as TIFF, GIF, PNG, or a raw image format. JPEG is also not well suited to files that will undergo multiple edits, as some image quality will usually be lost each time the image is decompressed and recompressed (generation loss). To avoid this, an image that is being modified or may be modified in the future can be saved in a lossless format such as PNG, and a copy exported as JPEG for distribution.

Here’s a better description of PNG and a comparison of it to the other types of graphic files ( you need to scroll a bit to find the word comparison!)

For me I love using PNG because I do not have the issues of quality loss when I continually edit the photo… but then my printer does not print the photo as nice as the JPEG. So I basically use PNG until I am satisfied with the editing and then I export my graphic to JPEG to use on my scrapbook page.

I am a hybrid scrapbooker (digitally embellish photos and use fonts to enhance scrapbook page) but use traditional framing/embellishments on scrapbook page! So JPEG is what I really need for my printer to print.